The Journal<\/em> that the company did not find anything that would cause service to deteriorate around Mancos. But a Verizon technician showed up at her house and spent an hour working with her on her 5-acre property. He offered advice: Try purchasing a certain type of after-market booster.<\/p>\nThe device gave her two bars of service, enough to make calls without driving to town. But at 3 p.m. Tuesday, she began receiving a \u201cNetwork Unavailable\u201d message on her phone.<\/p>\n
She is thankful for the technician\u2019s help.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m grateful for the fact that someone actually showed up, and he was transparent and honest. I\u2019ve called a number of times, put in call tickets, and I couldn\u2019t get anyone out here,\u201d Tuxhorn said after the Verizon technician\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n
Tuxhorn isn\u2019t alone among Verizon\u2019s disappointed cellphone customers.<\/p>\n
Dana Petersen, who lives in the Summit Lake area, said she\u2019s been using a booster for her Verizon phone for five years, and like Tuxhorn, about three months ago, she saw a rapid deterioration in reception.<\/p>\n
Now, she\u2019s discovered she can make calls only if she walks up a hill near her house or stands on a picnic table outside the house.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do question how a corporation with such an incredible budget and is rolling in profits can\u2019t seem to invest in infrastructure around here. That seems disappointing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Based on the technician\u2019s advice and guidance, Tuxhorn invested $120 in a booster on Amazon and $30 for a conduit, cement, rubber seals and a pole to install an exterior antenna and cable and an interior booster and antenna.<\/p>\n
She saved money by installing the equipment but added that it wouldn\u2019t be a good do-it-yourself project \u201cif this is your first rodeo.\u201d<\/p>\n
She noted her neighbors, too, have lost cellphone coverage. \u201cYou know, people use equipment out here, and eventually someone\u2019s going to get hurt and really need to make a call, and now you\u2019re pretty much out of luck.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cathleen Grimes, Tuxhorn\u2019s neighbor and a Verizon customer, said she used to get three or four bars of service from the second floor of her house. Now, she\u2019s lucky to get one bar, and she says she can\u2019t make calls from home.<\/p>\n
The technician who visited Tuxhorn said the Verizon network is overloaded in summer because of tourists and second-home summer residents. That makes sense to Tuxhorn.<\/p>\n
She said she first noticed deteriorating cellphone coverage during the 416 Fire, when she was hobbled by knee surgery and needed to make frequent calls to doctors and pharmacists.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were a lot of firefighters in the area during the 416 using the network, and I think that contributed to it,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But Grimes doesn\u2019t completely buy the story.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think they\u2019re just feeding us a song and dance because they don\u2019t want to put out money to fix it. If they\u2019re not going to fix it, they should give us a 90% discount if our cellphones are only 10% of what we had,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Now, Tuxhorn, facing the return of the dreaded \u201cNetwork Unavailable\u201d message, is wondering what comes next.<\/p>\n
parmijo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Resident looks for a fix for home\u2019s failing service<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":74120,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5754,5738,5737,5736,5793,5735,5741,6051,6052],"tags":[338,21,28,83,29,2068,2069],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-74119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-business-enterprises","category-cortez","category-headlines","category-local-news","category-mancos","category-news","category-newsletter","category-telecommunication-equipment","category-telecommunication-service","tag-business-enterprises","tag-cortez","tag-headlines","tag-mancos","tag-newsletter","tag-telecommunication-equipment","tag-telecommunication-service"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":92547,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74119\/revisions\/92547"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74119"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=74119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}